


Rules, Damn Rules and Statistics

by pipisafoat



Series: Abby Lyman [6]
Category: The West Wing
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, Disability, Disabled Character, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, invisible disability
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-11
Updated: 2017-12-11
Packaged: 2019-02-13 07:10:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12978777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pipisafoat/pseuds/pipisafoat
Summary: “We need to come up with some new Rules,” Donna says abruptly, lifting her coffee to her mouth and raising one eyebrow over it at her breakfast companion. She folds the New York Times carefully and and places it on the edge of Josh’s desk beside her muffin.Josh can hear the capital R in Rules, just like he could hear it when he was released from the hospital after Rosslyn. “What Rules?” he asks, curious about her reasoning for their necessity as well as her ideas for the actual rules. He doesn’t fold the Washington Post, but he lowers it to his desk beside his cinnamon roll.





	Rules, Damn Rules and Statistics

“We need to come up with some new Rules,” Donna says abruptly, lifting her coffee to her mouth and raising one eyebrow over it at her breakfast companion. She folds the New York Times carefully and and places it on the edge of Josh’s desk beside her muffin.

Josh can hear the capital R in Rules, just like he could hear it when he was released from the hospital after Rosslyn. “What Rules?” he asks, curious about her reasoning for their necessity as well as her ideas for the actual rules. He doesn’t fold the Washington Post, but he lowers it to his desk beside his cinnamon roll.

“Rules about your service dog, when you get one. Rules about how I help you manage your symptoms now and about what you have to do alone.”

He nods and flips up the dangling bottom of his paper on the third try, but Donna already has a legal pad by then, wherever it came from. He lets the paper fall - and it slithers all the way to the floor, of course - and hands her a pen from a mug on his desk that he’s pretty sure she brought in one day just so he could hand her pens.

“Service dog Rules first or last?” Donna asks, and he shrugs. “Okay, well, once you have it, we’ll need to change some of these Rules, but we can at least start thinking about it now. What Rules do you want to have?”

Josh blinks and stares at her, cocking his head to the left after a moment. “You want me to come up with these Rules?” he asks, stuck between confusion and amusement.

A light blush is creeping across Donna’s cheeks. “In retrospect, you should have had input on the first set of Rules. I can’t go back and fix that, but we’re going to do it right this time.”

“I didn’t have a problem with those Rules,” he tells her, trying to be reassuring.

“Josh, you complained constantly.”

He shrugs, unable to argue that fact. All he’d done at that point was complain, and the Rules had existed around him as surely as his sheets and food. “I never tried to break them. I didn’t let anyone else break them, either. The Rules were fine; I just needed to complain.”

Silence reigns for a minute before Donna replies, “Okay. Glossing over that last bit. Still, I’m not your mother, and you’re not a child, so your input is required on this set of Rules.”

Josh grins but wisely refrains from asking if the first Rule is that he participate in making all the other Rules. “Ah-kay. Well, for the dog, nobody should touch him or talk to him if he’s in here or wearing his vest.”

“Good,” Donna says, sparing him a brief smile as she scribbles furiously on the legal pad. He hopes she plans to type these Rules up, or there will be issues with her ‘distinctive penmanship.’ “What else?”

He closes his eyes and thinks back to the phone calls he’s had with Dogs of Destiny to get his application approved. “Food and treats. I’m the only one who gives them to him.”

Donna looks up at him mid-word - or maybe it’s the end of a thought; he honestly can’t tell with her rushed handwriting. “Why’s that?”

Josh shifts in his chair, suddenly anxious. He folds his arms then unfolds them, fidgets his fingers then stills them, and finally settles on resting one ankle on the opposite knee and letting his top leg wiggle wildly. “It’s something they said when I was doing the phone interview for the dog,” he explains, grabbing a second pen out of the mug and starts fiddling with it. “It helps with the bonding. And treats for doing a task right, it helps.”

“That makes sense.” Donna resumes writing but stops again after a short moment to look expectantly at Josh.

“I can’t think of anything else for the dog.” He uncrosses his legs but continues to fidget with the pen as Donna flips to the next page in the legal pad.

“Rules for you and me,” she announces, looking up at him.

Josh finds the pen wiggling at a higher speed in his hand. “I, uh, I don’t know what you mean,” he admits. He’s pretty sure she’s not asking for things like ‘We won’t kiss,’ but it’s hard to be sure.

“I mean when you have a … an episode … when I should intervene and when I should leave it to you, what I should or shouldn’t do to try to help.” Her voice sounds odd, and when Josh looks at her, she won’t quite meet his eyes. He sees the tears welled up in them, though, and wishes he knew whether his sudden impulse is the right thing to do.

He stands from his chair and walks around his desk to sit in the visitor chair, tugging it around to face Donna. His hand falls on hers and takes the pen from her too-tight grasp. He drops it inelegantly on the desk as he works a finger, then two, into her hand. His thumb strokes her wrist gently to settle her and loosen her muscles. “So far, you’ve been spot on in knowing how much to do for me,” he tells her in his most gentle voice. “I don’t know how you can tell, but I’ve wanted you to jump in every time you have and no times you haven’t. And you’re good at doing the right thing when you do jump in.”

Josh watches her left arm rise and decides to look away so she can wipe her tears with some level of privacy. As he’s studiously looking at their hands, he decides to see if she’s relaxed enough to hold more than just two of his fingers.

Donna opens her hand and takes his into it entirely, squeezing before touching his chin lightly with her left hand. She doesn’t let go of his hand as he meets her eyes. “One thing Stanley mentioned when I talked to him the other day was that you’re relying on me at work to get you through the day. He wants — He thinks — He—“

It’s Josh’s turn to squeeze Donna’s hand. “You don’t have to tell me anything you talk about with Stanley,” he offers, not really sure where the line between ‘helping Josh’ and ‘Donna’s therapy’ is in those conversations. It’s probably pretty muddled.

“He thinks I’ll get burned out, and I don’t know. Maybe I will. It doesn’t feel like I will. But he said that the overwhelming majority of people in my position do, and that the best way to make sure it doesn’t happen is to have lines like the Rules give us. He thinks we need to shift the lines with the Rules so you’re trying to do more on your own, without me.”

Josh finds his fingers clutching with one hand at the seat of his chair and with the other at Donna’s hand so tightly she flinches away from his grasp. “Sorry,” he mutters quickly, focusing on relaxing enough not to hurt her. When he’s settled back to a grasp with appropriate pressure, he runs his thumb along her wrist as a second, silent apology.

As though she were waiting for just that signal, Donna speaks again. “I’m not abandoning you, Josh. You’re not alone. I’m still here, and I’m not going anywhere. Your safety net is still there. I want to just try to step back, one tiny step back, and let you practice doing more without me.”

“I can’t,” Josh blurts, fingers tightening again just to the edge of too much. “I … I can’t. I need …. I can’t do it without you. I just … I don’t even go to the store anymore, did you know that? I have my house cleaner pick up groceries for me. You know how bad a trip to the Hill is; you’ve been with me. I can’t do this alone!”

Donna turns in her chair to face him, transfers his hand, now a clenched fist, to her left hand to allow her right hand to settle on his shoulder. “Can you calm yourself, Josh?” she asks, rubbing his shoulder gently.

He closes his eyes and runs his attention through his body. Pounding heart, gasping breaths, tense muscles. “Shit,” he says quietly without opening his eyes.

“It’s okay, we’ve caught it before it’s a problem,” she says in her most encouraging voice. “Now you just have to calm down. You’ve done it before, Josh, so I know you can do it again.”

“I can’t,” he says, anxiety spiking up sharply into his throat.

“You’ve done it before, so do it again,” she says, the hand on his shoulder surely feeling the way he’s shaking. Her voice hardens suddenly. “Do it, Josh.”

He tries to turn his flinch into a nod, but the barely-there curse she utters tells him it didn’t work. “I’m here to help, but you have to start it,” she tries, back to gentle and encouraging. He hates himself for needing that tone, for losing it even that little bit when she tried a different tactic, for losing it at all over the idea of Donna no longer doing something that’s definitely not part of her job description, for having PTSD, for that second diagnosis he never wanted added to his chart for so, so many reasons. He hates himself so much, in that moment, that his throat closing from anxiety and killing him doesn’t feel unreasonable, doesn’t feel like a bad idea. It almost feels like poetic justice, the diagnosis he fought so hard against fighting back and taking his life. The idea actually relaxes him some.

“Good,” Donna says quietly, and he vows never to tell her what she just called good. She surely thinks he used one of the things his therapist taught him. “What else can you do to calm down, Josh?”

He can feel his face scrunching up as he tries to remember those things from therapy - Donna’s never said anything about his tough thinking face, but she always leaves with a smile when he’s had it on. Joe, his therapist, gave him a breathing exercise that had worked during therapy, so he figures now is the time to try it out, with Donna standing by to help if it doesn’t work. He shifts his hand in her grasp and taps his thumb against her wrist to keep a steady pace. Inhale for 1-2-3-4, hold it for 1-2-3-4, exhale 1-2-3-4, wait 1-2-3-4. After a few repetitions, he’s actually feeling lightheaded, so he stops. Donna’s rubbing his shoulder - no, she’s moved down his arm to rub his bicep and tricep. He turns his attention to the same muscles on the other side of his body and tries to relax them. As long as he’s focused on a muscle, he can get it to relax, but it snaps back to full tension as soon as he turns to a new muscle. “It’s not working,” he tells Donna.

“You sound better,” she replies. “What’s not working? What are you having trouble with?”

“I can’t relax.” He opens his eyes suddenly, blinking past the return of light. She’s wearing the same patient, caring expression she always has when helping him with this. He’s suddenly very aware that they’re holding hands and have been for a while now, but he doesn’t pull away. The contact is grounding, and he thinks he still needs that right now.

She squeezes his hand as humor enters her face. “Remember what Joe told you to try a couple weeks ago? Standing against the wall?”

Josh huffs a tiny laugh. “I told you because it was absurd and entertaining.”

“Try it anyway?” she asks, squeezing his hand and smiling at him a bit lopsidedly.

He’s honestly never been able to refuse that smile unless Leo or the President told him to do so. That smile means she really, really, really wants whatever she’s asking for. He’s only seen it for one of the Christmases he’s known her, and she got exactly what she asked him for. He’s seen it for time off for a favorite cousin’s wedding, for the last cookie in a box he bought to treat himself, for taking the time to move a turtle out of the road. He’s never seen it for something for him, but still: he can’t deny her request. “Yeah, okay.”

She squeezes his hand again, and he’d swear he just saw tension bleed out of her. “The only space in here is behind a door,” she comments, rising to her feet and pulling him along with their joined hands and his unwillingness to lose eye contact yet. “I can go outside and keep people from trying to come in and hitting you with it.”

“Good idea,” he says before he catches up to the first part of the sentence. “Or we could just lock that door.”

Donna gnaws on her lip for a moment before smiling. “That’s definitely a safer way of doing it,” she agrees, gently detaching her hand from his grip. 

He stares at the empty space where her hand should go for an embarrassingly long amount of time before flexing his hand, swallowing hard, and forcing his gaze back to her. “If this works, maybe we can get your Rules done before Callahan arrives."


End file.
